I have a relatively unmodified Red Hat 9.0 system, no changes to X.

I downloaded fontconfig 2.1.94 and did:

./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man

which worked fine, and then "make", which ran for a while and eventually died
and spat out:

gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I.. -I../src -g -O2
-c fcfreetype.c  -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/fcfreetype.lo
fcfreetype.c: In function `FcFreeTypeQuery':
fcfreetype.c:783: `BDF_PropertyRec' undeclared (first use in this function)
fcfreetype.c:783: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
fcfreetype.c:783: for each function it appears in.)
fcfreetype.c:783: parse error before "prop"
fcfreetype.c:784: `prop' undeclared (first use in this function)
fcfreetype.c:785: `BDF_PROPERTY_TYPE_ATOM' undeclared (first use in this function)
fcfreetype.c:791: parse error before "prop"
fcfreetype.c:793: `BDF_PROPERTY_TYPE_INTEGER' undeclared (first use in this
function)
fcfreetype.c:794: `BDF_PROPERTY_TYPE_CARDINAL' undeclared (first use in this
function)
make[2]: *** [fcfreetype.lo] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/archive/Downloads/Fonts/fontconfig-2.1.94/src'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/archive/Downloads/Fonts/fontconfig-2.1.94'
make: *** [all-recursive-am] Error 2